The cure for a disease that was crippling our children arrived in Stark County 66 years ago. April 12 Verdict on Vaccine Is Seen As Death Knell of Widespread Polio, a front-page headline in The Canton Repository reported on April 3, 1955, looking ahead to the upcoming day when a press conference was expected to confirm the effectiveness of the anti-polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas E. Salk of Pittsburgh. Go-Ahead Signal Is Expected to All-Out Attack.
And, indeed, little more than a week later, an announcement said that results of testing on 400,000 children done in the summer of 1954 by Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. of the University of Michigan verified that the vaccine developed by his former student, Dr. Jonas E. Salk of Pittsburgh, was 80 to 90% effective in preventing paralytic polio.